Disaster and
emergency preparedness is not silly. The Red Cross certainly doesn’t think so…FEMA
doesn’t thinks.Folks living near
wildfires don’t think so. People face potentially inconvenient,
uncomfortable and even life threatening challenges every day.

Imagine
being stuck on the Interstate in a snow or ice storm or a traffic jam caused by
an accident or a dam breaking?

We tend to associate with people who think
like us, so doomsday scenarios proponents tend to run in packs. Many scenarios have definite
political or religious affiliations and preppers seem to be at one end of our very
polarized society.

It comes
down to a matter of chances. What are the chances of a nuclear war going down,
or a civil riot taking place, or a zombie apocalypse, or a total economic
collapse and so on?

Let's say
such a doomsday scenario really happens. What are the chances of someone who
prepared their entire life to survive that scenario and one who
did nothing?

The American Red Cross says that only one out of ten American households has taken the appropriate
preparedness steps for both manmade and natural disasters.

And you don’t have to be a doomsday prepper to know that there have been
some very alarming trends in the news (and not reported in the news) lately...Including:

The rise of domestic
terrorism in America… even more riots and robberies than you’ve been seeing in the news…
increasing frequency of natural disasters such as the meltdown of the dam in CA
and the increase in severe weather... greater potential for epidemics… and perhaps most
obviously, a long-overdue stock market crash [thanks to the conditions Obama
left to Pres. Trump].

Self-reliance is a mindset, an approach to life that can be
adopted whether you live in a wilderness cabin or a “little
box” in the suburbs. Self-reliance is about living a life in which you make decisions and
opinions with primary respect to your own experience of the world.
You trust yourself. You’re true to yourself.

It’s not an excuse to be lazy, immoral,
confrontational, distant, or an asshole in general.

It’s not an excuse to mock the ideals of others, be
narcissistic, or hurt others in any way.

Sartre recognized that “Man is condemned to be free;
because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

Notice the word “condemned” — the freedom
self-reliance offers isn’t fatalistic or nihilistic. It means taking on more
responsibility, just a higher grade responsibility than we’re usually saddled
with.

Self-reliance is a call to be true to yourself in the
most important way possible.

To try and use it as a way to justify the worst parts
of yourself is a terrible mistake.

Doing It All On Your Own

Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic
divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook
product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island
in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands
of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it
descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic
Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from
cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone
could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to
form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the
apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little
island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own
preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the
levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really
thin cultural ice right now.”

Emergency water distillation
can also save your life
in a coastal or maritime emergency when all you have is
undrinkable salt water or suspect POISONS or deadly pathogens in your
local water supply, an ever present danger from the rise
of global terrorism.
If terrorists attack the water supply to a city, as ISIS has done in Syria, what will you drink?

In a survival situation, even
small wounds can be deadly. If not kept clean, your body can go septic, which
is difficult to treat without modern medicine. Fortunately, there is an easy
DIY antiseptic you can use to quickly and easily clean wounds that is perfect
for survivalists and preppers.

It’s called Daikin’s solution,
and it was developed during WWI to treat soldier’s wounds in the field. It is
credited with saving hundreds of lives during that war, and is one of the
safest and most effective antiseptics you can find.

It is essentially just bleach and water, making it
incredibly simple to prep for and make. Here’s how

So, you want to be
a gear tester? Great; you've come to the right place! This series
of lessons was created to help you to easily become a BackpackGearTest
tester. There are sometimes misconceptions about what it takes to
participate as a gear tester. Some think that becoming a tester is hard,
or that you need a lot of experience before becoming a tester, but in reality,
gear testing is fun, easy, open to people of all experience levels - including
newbies! - and it allows you to try new things.

Contributors
and subscribers enable the Poor Man Survivor to post 150+ free essays annually. It is for this
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